Thursday 9 May 2013

Microsoft Outlook Calendar: Recurring Meetings

Set end dates and limit the number of occurrences

With Outlook, it is SO easy to schedule a meeting that has multiple occurrences on a regular basis. That being said, I would *always* recommend that you:

1) always set an end date
2) limit the recurring series to a specific number of occurrences.

This is because recurring meetings are going to require modifications at one point or another. Over time attendees change, locations or times change for various reasons (vacations, unforeseen circumstances, hirings/firings/quittings, etc.). Outlook saves each of these unique changes as a meeting exception. Meetings with a very large number of exceptions result in a meeting series that is difficult to manage. Not surprisingly, it can introduce unexpected behaviour. You can always create a new meeting series when the current one ends. When thinking about the number of occurrences, consider the frequency. In the period of a year, a twice a week meeting will have about 90 more occurrences than a monthly meeting during that same period.

End a recurring meeting before the original end date

Rather than cancelling a recurring meeting, your best bet is to change the end date for the series. This allows you and your attendees to keep a record of the meetings that occurred in the past. If you cancel the recurring meeting for good, you're going to lose the history. Instead, set a new end date and send the update to all attendees. This ends the meeting series early, but still keeps your history intact.

Note If you end the meeting series early, exceptions associated with the recurring meeting are lost, To learn more about exceptions, see the “Set end dates and limit the number of occurrences” section.
For more information about cancelling all future meetings in a series, see: Cancel all future meetings in a series

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